The art of simplicity

If there is one book about JavaScript I recommend reading, it’s JavaScript: The good parts . It was a real eye opener for me and brought back the love for this misused but beautiful language. I really like the book size, especially if you compare it with the full JavaScript reference book. It makes you wonder how much bad parts there are in JavaScript…

IIS is really great. But sometimes you get an error message without any clue how to fix it. When I was testing an ASP.NET MVC website on my Windows 7 64-bit machine, I got the following error: HTTP Error 401.2 – Unauthorized You are not authorized to view this page due to invalid authentication headers. After trying to change almost every possible setting in IIS I finally found the root cause of the issue. My default installation of IIS was running without the Windows Authentication module installed. As my website was expecting windows authentication, it was not unexpected to see this error. After enabling this feature in the list Windows Features, everything worked!

If you did some web development in .NET you probably know the web.config transform feature. This allows you to link config transforms to your web.config. For example if  you make a web.debug.config it can contain all the changes you want made specific for your debug environment. Unfortunately this feature is only supported for web.config files out-of-the-box. So what if you want to transform your app.configs, or any XML file? Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and Chuck England bring you the solution with this Visual Studio Extension called SlowCheetah XML Transforms . An overview of the features: Added tooling to desktop project to create XDT transforms Ability to transform app.config for desktop projects based on build configuration any XML file to the output folder based on build configuration Added tooling to enable previewing XDT transforms For web projects you can easily transform other XML files during package/publish You can find...

Beginning October 1, 2011, Microsoft will make two pricing related updates to the Windows Azure Platform. First, the price of extra small compute will be reduced by 20 percent. Additionally, the compute allocations for all of the offers will be simplified to small compute hours. Additionally, current Introductory Special offer customers and customers who sign up for this offer prior to October 1 will receive both 750 extra small compute hours and 750 small compute hours for the months of August and September. Details about this pricing update can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/08/15/announcing-simplified-data-transfer-billing-meters-and-swappable-compute-instancess.aspx and some extra comments at http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-cut-its-low-end-windows-azure-cloud-pricing/10343 .

For a project I needed to validate incoming WCF messages against an XSD.  After a few minutes I discovered the following MSDN article about Message Inspectors containing exactly the information I needed: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa717047.aspx . It shows a sample implements a basic client and service message validation mechanism that validates incoming messages against a set of configurable XML Schema documents. This sample is part of the  Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Samples for .NET Framework 4 .

As a developer, I’m always looking for tools that make my life easier and improve my productivity. Last week I discovered this list( 135784_.NET_Free_Dev_Tools-table v6_080111_0 ) with over 50 free tools. It contains a some of the most popular and useful free software development tools available. The vast majority of the tools listed in the table are geared toward .NET development, but there are a few others thrown in for those who are doing cross-platform development. 50 tools are listed in nine categories that represent a cross-section of the types of tools most widely available: Code-generation/editing/templates Content management systems (CMSs) Controls/Components Data access and Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) Documentation & Project Management Performance Analysis/Management Software Configuration Management/Version Control Testing and Debugging Visual Studio add-ins

Last week I was spending some time comparing Fluent NHibernate with the new code mapping feature in NHibernate 3.2. However, no matter what I tried, I always got the same error message. The error was happening in the CreateSessionFactory method and returned the following information: An invalid or incomplete configuration was used while creating a SessionFactory. Check PotentialReasons collection, and InnerException for more detail. Could not compile the mapping document: (XmlDocument) persistent class FluentNHibernate.Model.Product, FluentNHibernate, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null not found Could not load file or assembly 'FluentNHibernate, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. After losing almost all my hair, I finally discovered what caused the problem.  I had named the project FluentNHibernate...

When integrating Windows Identity Foundation in your web applications probably one of the first errors you will see is the following: In the description of the error is stated that you can solve the error by adding the following configuration to your web.config: <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> This solves the issue indeed but reverts the validation mode back to the ASP.NET 2.0 version. A better solution is to create and register your own RequestValidator for WIF. public class WIFRequestValidator : RequestValidator { protected override bool IsValidRequestString(HttpContext context, string value, RequestValidationSource requestValidationSource, string collectionKey, out int validationFailureIndex) { validationFailureIndex = 0; if (requestValidationSource == RequestValidationSource.Form && collectionKey.Equals(WSFederationConstants.Parameters.Result, StringComparison.Ordinal)) { SignInResponseMessage message = WSFederationMessage.CreateFromForm...

Integrating ADFS with the Windows Azure Control Service(ACS) is not that hard but requires a long list of steps and actions. While searching for some clues I found the following blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willpe/archive/2010/10/25/windows-authentication-adfs-and-the-access-control-service.aspx It contains all the information you need to setup federation between your on-premise Active Directory domain and ACS. A must read!

The default behaviour of the jqGrid control is that it starts loading your data if you open up your page. But what if you don’t want this? How can you prevent the jqGrid from autoloading? We solved it by setting the datatype to 'local' .  To force the loading of data afterwards, you can change datatype to 'json' or 'xml'   by using  . jqGrid(‘ setGridParam’,{datatype:’json’}) method and then call the trigger("reloadGrid") method.

For logging purposes I needed to get the operation name of the called WCF service and the content of the message. How can you get this done? Important to notice when you look at the code is that I created an attribute and implement both the IDispatchMessageInspector and IServiceBehavior interface. This allows me to register this message inspector by just adding the attribute on top of my WCF service class. /// <summary> /// When applying this attribute to a service contract, /// the input and output messages will be logged. /// </summary> [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class)] public class MessageLoggingBehaviorAttribute : Attribute, IDispatchMessageInspector, IServiceBehavior { #region IDispatchMessageInspector Members /// <summary> /// Will be executed after a request is received. /// </summary> /// <param name="request">The request.</param> /// <param name="channel">The channel.</param> /// <para...

For one of my projects, our end-users went crazy and asked for a dynamic fields feature which allows them to add and remove some extra fields on every entity. This is actually quite easy to implement with NHibernate. Let’s first have a look at the entity(this is a simplified version): public class File { public virtual int Id { get; set; } public virtual string Name { get; set; } public virtual IDictionary<string, string> Attributes { get; set; } } And the corresponding mapping file (didn’t had time to look at the code mapping yet): <class name="File" table="Files"> <id name="Id"> <generator class="native"/> </id> <property name="Name"/> <map name="Attributes" table="FileAttributes"> <key column="FileId"/> <index column="AttributeName" type="System.String"/> <element column="Attributevalue" type="Syst...

As a big believer of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment systems, I’m always looking at new ways to get my applications build and roll-out in an automated way. So the same thing is true for our cloud service projects. I wanted to make the deployment to Windows Azure a part of TFS build process.  I looked around on the Internet and found the following great library: http://deploytoazure.codeplex.com/ DeployToAzure allows automating deployment of Windows Azure project and making it a part of TFS 2010 build process without using PowerShell and Azure Management CmdLets. Solution includes: a set of custom workflow actions wrapping Azure Management API operations such as GetDeployment, GetOperationStatus, NewDeployment, RemoveDeployment and SetDeploymentStatus; helper actions such as FindPackageAndConfigurationFiles, LoadCertificate and WaitForOperationToComplete; designer activity DeployToAzure implementing deployment logic ; reusable ...

Although JSON is a great and simple format, I’m not a big fan of the way dates are represented.  If you have a look at a JSONResult in ASP.NET MVC you’ll probably see some data like this: {“result”:[{"ProductId":"21329023","OrderDate":"\/Date(1296824894700”}]} You’ll see that the Date is: \/Date(1296824894700)\/ Not very JavaScript friendly. We tried a lot of different approaches in getting something more useful back from our action results(including just using strings instead of datetimes). In the end we decided to use the  jQuery’s dataFilter property. The dataFilter function is used to sanitize a response from a web server.  We ended up with the following small jQuery code: $.ajaxSettings.dataFilter = function (data, type) { if (type === 'json') { data = data.replace(/\/Date\((.*?)\)\//gi, function (fullMatch, $1, $2, $3) { try { return $1 + ne...

One of the great features of ASP.NET MVC is modelbinding. It automatically converts data coming from your form, route data, query string parameters etc… into parameters on your action methods. However we noticed one problem. Imagine you have the following action method public ActionResult PlaceOrder(DateTime orderDate) { ... } The problem that we noticed is that  MVC is converting our datetime to MM/dd/yyyy although our users are setting dates through the date format dd/MM/yyyy. For example, submitting a call to the action with a string '03/02/2011' results in a DateTime of  '02/03/2011'. We were able to solve this issue by adding a globalization section to our web.config. The modelbinder picks this up and uses the correct date format. <system.web> <globalization uiCulture="nl-BE" culture="nl-BE" /> </system.web>

And to complete the list of updates, Microsoft published an update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit . August 2011 Update The August 2011 update of the training kit includes the following updates: [Updated] Labs and Demos to leverage the August 2011 release of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 [Updated] Windows Azure Deployment to use the latest version of the Azure Management Cmdlets [Updated] Exploring Windows Azure Storage to support deleting snapshots Applied several minor fixes in content

Last week the Windows Azure time did not only announced the availability of the Windows Azure Storage Analytics feature but also released Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 - August 2011 Upgrade. Some features that are included are: Profiling the application running in Windows Azure. New ASP.NET MVC 3 web role template. Multi-configuration files in one cloud project. More validation in the service package and deployment phase. Download and Install The easiest way to install the upgrade is by using the Web Platform Installer which can be found here . The WebPI will download some dependency packages besides, such as the latest Windows Azure SDK, ASP.NET MVC 3 for Windows Azure, etc. ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Role When creating a new cloud project you now have a  new ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Role template available. This template already added all the required  assemblies related to MVC3 and set the Copy Local = True by default. Multiple Service Configurati...

Last week Microsoft released  Windows Azure Storage Analytics. This feature offers developers and operations the ability to track, analyze, and debug usage of Windows Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables and Queues). You can use this data to analyze storage usage to improve the design of your applications and their access patterns to Windows Azure Storage. Analytics data consists of: Logs Provide trace of executed requests for Blobs, Tables and Queues Metrics Provide summary of key capacity and request statistics for Blobs, Tables and Queues The official announcement can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/08/03/announcing-windows-azure-storage-analytics.aspx and Steve Marx talked about some of the new features here: http://blog.smarx.com/posts/playing-with-the-new-windows-azure-storage-analytics-features and even created a sample application: http://storageanalytics.cloudapp.net .

Normally when you are doing  Scrum, you have a Daily Scrum meeting. The idea is that you have a daily meeting where you basically determine how the work is progressing and if divine intervention is required to keep things progressing. The goal is to provide a transparency where anyone can see what exactly the team is up to. The basic format of a scrum meeting is pretty simple. Each person on the team says three things: What did I do since our last meeting What am I doing until our next meeting What is impeding me Last week I was reading this post by John Sonmez about how these questions are too vague and can easily evolve to the following conversion: “I continued to work on backlog X, I’ll continue to work on backlog X today.” This is of course not very useful and a pure waste of time. I noticed that our own Scrum meetings were also evolving in this direction, so I took John Sonmez advice and tried replacing the 3 topics in a Scrum report with these: ...

After creating a Database Project in Visual Studio and importing all database objects, we got one error: “SQL03006: User: [x] has an unresolved reference to Login [X]” If I double click on the error, it takes me to a CREATE USER statement in one of the files. The problem is that the LOGIN that it's referencing is a SERVER object, not a DATABASE object and your can't run server based SQL commands in a database project type. How can you solve this? Right click on your solution and choose Add -> New Project. For the project type select "SQL Server 2008 Server Project." Do a schema compare against the server project and get it all synchronized. Go back do your database project and right click on References and "Add Database Reference" and select your server project. That’s it! What you can also do is turn off schema checking (Tools->Options->Database Tools->Schema Compare->SQL Server, then the Object Type tab) ...

How many times have you wanted to send a project to a friend or upload it to a web site like MSDN Code Gallery only to find that your zip file has lots of stuff that you don't need to send in it making the file larger than it needs to be. And then if you forget about removing Source Control bindings whoever gets your project will be prompted with errors about Source Control. This is no longer a problem, thanks to CleanProject . Clean Project is a utility that cleans Visual Studio project directories so you can quickly upload or email a zip file with your solution. CodePlex Download CleanProject v1.1.0 Visual Studio Gallery CleanProject MSDN Code Samples (source download) CleanProject More info at   http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rjacobs/archive/2011/07/24/clean-project-cleans-visual-studio-solutions-for-uploading-or-email.aspx

When testing a newly developed WCF Service, the webservice call fails with a  CryptographicException including the following message: "Keyset does not exist" This is not the most helpful error but some googling around revealed that issue was caused because the IIS user didn’t had access to the private key for the webservice certificate. You can solve this by following these steps... Start -> Run -> MMC File -> Add/Remove Snapin Add the Certificates Snap In Select Computer Account, then hit next Select Local Computer (the default), then click Finish On the left panel from Console Root, navigate to Certificates (Local Computer) -> Personal -> Certificates Right click on your certificate -> All Tasks -> Manage Private Keys Change the private key security settings.

The moment you start diving deep into web security, your live will change forever. Possible vulnerabilities appear everywhere in your web application and you don’t know where to start. So here are some free security tools/sites that help you on the right track: OWASP web site ( https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page ) The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a 501c3 not-for-profit worldwide charitable organization focused on improving the security of application software. In their web site, you almost could find every piece of information regarding security. Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle ( http://www.microsoft.com/security/sdl/default.aspx ) A practical process we could follow to make our software more secure. Burp ( http://portswigger.net/burp/download.html) Burp Suite is an integrated platform for performing security testing of web applications. Its various tools work seamlessly together to support the entire testing pr...